A little less than two years ago, the KDE community launched an initiative called KDE Usability & Productivity. It is a project to improve the software of the KDE Applications, KDE Frameworks and the Plasma graphical environment. Thanks to this initiative come important improvements, such as the new generation notifications that will arrive next June 11 with Plasma 5.16 and much more.
Last night Nate Graham posted an entry on pointieststicks.com in which he tells us about everything they have achieved in the last year and a half. And it is not little. In fact, I tried Kubuntu myself 3-4 years ago and came back to Ubuntu; I have tried it again at Cosmic Cuttlefish and I think I will stay forever. Here is the list of everything they have improved since the launch of KDE Usability & Productivity.
KDE Usability & Productivity, the root of the best advances in the KDE world
- Full support for configuring mice and touch panels using the Libinput driver in both X11 and Wayland.
- New notification system much more useful for common workflows.
- Better default text contrast and font rendering settings.
- Spectacular and powerful user interface and performance improvements for Discover.
- Many UI improvements in the open / save dialogs.
- Many performance and reliability improvements for the Baloo file indexing service.
- "Open Containing Folder" actions have been added through KDE apps.
- Various usability-related bug fixes, new features, and UI improvements in Spectacle.
- Okular's annotation tool has been improved.
- Support to show the creation date of the files.
- Support for easily tagging files in Dolphin and a more useful and intuitive Places panel.
- Setting the presentation wallpaper that shows the actual images that will be part of the presentation.
- Improved login and lock screens.
- Content styles (grid views and centered form layouts) for settings windows through KDE software.
- Simplified and more intuitive interface for many pages of the Preferences.
- Bug fixes and UI improvements across the entire software stack.
Many of these enhancements are already present in the latest versions of KDE Plasma, KDE Frameworks, and KDE Applications, but some are yet to come. And what remains. In any case, it is clear that KDE Usability & Productivity is an initiative whose fruits are being enjoyed by all users of KDE software. Are you one of them?